Book Five, Chapter 135: The Tower Climber

I briefly worked at my university’s football stadium during my freshman year of college.

I was selling sports memorabilia, and I was bad at it. It didn’t really matter—all I had to do was stand there and restock. It was a student job, not a real job. I had no ambition to stick around longer than I was contractually obligated to.

But still, I remembered my amazement at realizing exactly how massive our football stadium was—not just the field or the stands, but the area behind the stands where the stores and concessions were. It was like a giant tunnel that went on forever, and on game days, it would be filled with people walking shoulder to shoulder.

And yet, there were more tunnels that even the sports fans didn’t know about—the ones we could walk through in the back to load goods or just hang around. I worked that job for three months, just one semester, and I dreaded every single game day. But I will credit that experience for giving me a fascination with the internal workings of buildings. Even massive scary ones like this.

The last time I had been in tunnels underneath a stadium, I had gotten stabbed half to death, so I didn’t really get a chance to appreciate how big it was.

Walking into the enormous crescent-shaped building in front of me made the stadium from my college days feel tiny and cramped.

The lobby was at least the size of three football fields, and it was abuzz with people who I had to assume were fans or tourists. And although I could not hear, it did appear as if they were being separated into tour groups.

Many of them wore my hoodie or had a Walkman like mine. The girls had scrunchies in their hair, and there were so many baseball bats in the hands of those tourists that you would think we were at Yankee Stadium. It wasn’t just stuff that my friends and I wore—I saw someone wearing Arthur’s hat, which he rarely took off.

There was a store that sold memorabilia on the left side of the lobby, and once I realized that people weren’t noticing me, I decided to go scope it out.

Not only was this store huge, but it had pretty much every outfit that Kimberly had ever worn for sale. For 500 tokens—which I had to assume were the same coins we won at the end of a storyline—you could buy your own copy of The Atlas, although the shelf had it labeled as The Survivor’s Bible. I hadn’t heard anyone call it that for the longest time. I flipped through it. It was highly abridged and edited.

Gizmos, swords, guns—all claiming to have been used in various storylines—were lined up. Masks like those at the masquerade ball of The Strings Attached were for sale, with one being modeled by one of the enemies from that story. There was a whole wall of clothing for the University of Carousel Fighting Torsos.

All of our experiences and torments had come to this.

I wondered how Carousel felt about how its hellish world had been commodified and turned into a theme park.

Maybe it didn’t care. Maybe it was incapable of caring.

As I walked through the aisles of merch, a tour group passed by. I noticed because the tour leader called out, “Here is one of our most famous residents,” and I nearly started running because I thought I had been spotted.

She was gesturing away from where I was, though.

“Dr. Aldric Rose, our newest Narrator and long-time researcher,” she said, gesturing toward the man. “Dr. Rose, do you think you have a moment to talk to our lucky Sweepstakes winners? They came from all across the Many Worlds after being granted refuge here.”

I hunkered down behind a shelf to listen in. They were selling t-shirts with my face and the face of Mrs. Cloudburst from The Strings Attached on them, with a heart. That was almost enough to distract me from what was going on outside the shop.

“As you know,” the man said, “I was brought to Carousel just like you—after the Sweepstakes pulled me out of a world already lost to the Manyfold Hunger. I have a grant from The Company now to research a cure, and I’ve been approved as a Narrator. It becomes easier to get approved when most of the others flee. Do you all know what the Manyfold Hunger is?”

He wore glasses and was dressed in a blue shirt and one of those tan vests with lots of pockets. His outfit almost threatened to look normal.

“A disease,” one of the children said when called on.

The tour guide whispered something in his ear, and suddenly, he looked embarrassed.

“Kind of, yeah,” Dr. Rose said. He took a moment to think, pushing up his glasses. He spoke softly with the children. “It’s a hivemind. A collective entity. It has a great deal of biological control. A really bad deal for human populations. On planets without a human presence, it can cause an ecosystem to flourish remarkably well—it just doesn’t do well with us. Some of you know that better than I can describe. I’m glad that I can be part of The Company’s outreach efforts. I know many of you were probably nervous about taking refuge in a place like Carousel, but I can assure you: this is a good place.”

A little girl woefully said, “Is it going to come here too?”

This little girl had definitely heard of the Manyfold Hunger.

Dr. Rose got down on one knee and said, “While the Hunger does exhibit the ability to follow its prey throughout time and space, you are in Carousel now, and trust me, you have never been safer from the Manyfold Hunger. If it came here, Carousel would eat it for breakfast.”

He smiled, and the little girl nodded, though she still seemed scared. Some of the kids laughed.

“In fact,” Dr. Rose continued, “I think Carousel already has eaten up the Manyfold Hunger. Several times. I just can’t prove it yet. When I do, The Company, myself, and some brave players are going to run through Carousel’s hidden streets and back lots until we find a cure. There’s nothing out there that Carousel can’t handle, right? Sometimes, allying with the ultimate evil has its perks. All it takes is finding the way forward.”

He stood and smiled.

“What about the Party of Promise?” someone asked from the crowd.

He paused and thought.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we can get them to help. It’s a lot to ask. But even if they don’t want to help, we’ll be getting more players from the Many Worlds soon enough, and someone will be willing to do what it takes.” He took a deep breath. “That’s the thing most people don’t realize about this place. Carousel takes in the worst people, but it also grabs the best.”

He was putting on a brave face. Unlike many of the members of the Manifest Consortium, he almost seemed like he could have been a guy named Alan from Ohio. Just a normal guy. Maybe that was because he was an immigrant to their society.

“Say goodbye to Dr. Rose,” the tour guide called as he walked away, off toward some other corner of the lobby.

They brought refugees here? What was it, some kind of work program? Come work backstage at Carousel, or stay and get assimilated into the hive mind. Were they being as charitable as it seemed?

I just couldn’t wrap my head around these people.

Did they really think Mrs. Cloudburst and I were a thing?

I didn’t spend much time inside the souvenir shop. I didn’t need souvenirs. The workers there barely noticed me. They were busy with real customers—or, as I had done when I worked at the stadium as a student, the employees here were avoiding eye contact and hoping no one would talk to them.

Some things were universal, I guess.

I needed to find a way to the main part of the building—up into the tower at the center of the crescent. I knew that if I ended up backstage again, I would get lost.

Fortunately, this building was not designed like a maze, unlike many of the structures in Carousel. It was pretty straightforward. There was a sign with an arrow that said Offices, leading up a large row of red stairs. Or, of course, I could have taken one of the many elevators, which had the exact same fixtures and design as many of the things I saw on the red wallpaper.

I decided on the stairs, and while I wasn’t the only one traveling up, no one seemed to notice me.

Maybe they simply didn’t expect me, so they didn’t care to look. Once someone glanced inside the theater and realized I wasn’t there, they would likely raise alarms. Or maybe the bureaucracy was just tangled enough that no one would know what was going on, and when they saw the empty theater, they would just assume I wasn’t supposed to be there.

I was playing it by ear.

On the second floor, there was a flock of what I realized were reporters standing in front of a row of desks where people worked tirelessly. There were other things, hallways leading in every direction, but I couldn’t afford to search every inch of this place. There wouldn’t be time.

I looked at the group of people over.

They were the Carousel Press Corps.

I knew that because there was a big sign on the ceiling that said so.

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This world had many different news outlets—I had to expect as much. For all I knew, it had many times the population that Earth did, but I couldn’t say. All I knew was that I saw a lot of attractive, well-dressed people holding microphones, and yet, I didn’t see a single camera person.

Amazingly, they didn’t notice me either. I was just another person wearing souvenirs in a massive room with lots of distractions.

Did Hustle help me be unnoticed? I knew it was good for sneaking, but this felt a little bit too much.

I listened to the scuttlebutt as I passed by them to find another set of stairs at the other end of the room.

There was a person—presumably someone who worked for the Company and not the news outlets—giving remarks about the current storyline.

“At least one member of the Party of Promise will be tortured,” she said.

Yeah, I thought. Me.

I continued on. As much as I wanted to hear how they talked about us, Dr. Striga had mentioned something about a control room.

And so, when I got to the other end of the room, I found another large red staircase—this time going toward the right, which I assumed meant the stairs wound upward with each set turned 90 degrees until you got to the top.

Maybe I should have taken the elevator. Oh well.

Fortunately, the next set of stairs was nearby after I got to the top of the set leading away from the press corps. But I didn’t immediately start ascending.

Because the third floor only had only one room—if my reading of the map on the wall was correct. One massive room.

Scripting.

That was all it said.

There was a large, beautiful door—not the kind you would normally see in an office building, more like something that would open up to a ballroom.

Scripting… was that exactly what it sounded like?

There was a red velvet rope stretched across the front of the door, and a sign was stuck on it that said:

DO NOT ENTER UNTIL WE FIGURE THIS OUT.

There was no way I could resist peeking after reading that.

I snuck around one of the stanchions holding up the red velvet rope and tested the door. It wasn’t locked. Were these people that trusting?

The massive door creaked open just enough for me to slip through. Then, I found myself in a room bigger than any I had ever seen before, filled with desks, typewriters, and hundreds of different screens with live feeds of the storyline.

The typewriters were clicking away—with no one sitting at them.

And yet, they weren’t normal typewriters. They didn’t have single pages inside of them. Instead, they ticked away on long, unending rolls of paper that spread out and littered the entire room.

No wonder they didn’t want anyone in here. The place was covered in scripts—typed onto long rolls of paper.

I looked up at the live feeds. Generation Killer had not yet made it into the museum, but he was bombarding them with rocks, breaking windows, and it was clear they were going to try to ram the building with a stolen car.

I went to a typewriter close to the screen, where I saw one of them revving the engine. I looked down at what was being typed.

“Stay on your mark.”

That was the message to the Generation Killer behind the wheel.

They were waiting for the right timing. Were my friends aware of this? I wasn’t sure. They would be eventually, though.

Could I just type something like Turn off the car and go jump off a building? Would they do it if I did? These were the scripts, after all. Would that be a legitimate move for me? After all, everything about my being here was an extension of one trope or another.

Would that be a permitted action to take?